Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computing systems, and more particularly, to various embodiments for data management including heterogeneous compression in a replicated storage environment.
Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. Computer systems may include data storage systems, or disk storage systems, to process and store data. Data storage systems, or disk storage systems, are utilized to process and store data. A storage system may include one or more disk drives. These data processing systems typically require a large amount of data storage. Customer data, or data generated by users within the data processing system, occupies a great portion of this data storage. Many of these computer systems include virtual storage components. Data compression is widely used to reduce the amount of data required to process, transmit, or store a given quantity of information. Data compression is the coding of data to minimize its representation. Compression can be used, for example, to reduce the storage requirements for files, to increase the communication rate over a channel, or to reduce redundancy prior to encryption for greater security. However, data compression may consume a significant amount of computing (e.g. central processing unit “CPU”) resources. Compression may be used in a variety of different environments, including clustered or distributed environments. Due to data reliability concerns, many clustered and distributed systems replicate data over a number clustered storage controllers. The replication may be at a block level, a file level or an object level, depending on the storage type and model being used. Additionally, the level of replication (i.e. the number of copies replicated) varies between systems, depending on hardware stability and required reliability.